makeweight

Noun

1. Something of inferior quality which is included in a shipment to make up the weight.
   • 1893, Richard Le Gallienne, in a publisher's report on stories by Ernest Dowson, quoted in Jad Adams, Madder Music, Stronger Wine, page 88. I would advise you to accept these as an instalment of a volume, (they are not...
2. Something included to add to the apparent weight or force of an argument.
   • He added a long litany of peripheral precedents which the judge dismissed as mere makeweights.
   • Other railway schemes of the earliest period certainly mentioned benefits to agriculture, but only as a make-weight; most of them justified themselves by improved transport of minerals for shipment, […], or by carriage...
   • Fashion, as it happens, favors certain rows of the style matrix: museums, connoisseurs, and others are makeweights in the Artworld. - 1964 October 15, Arthur Danto, “The Artworld”, in The Journal of Philosophy, volume...